listen to those left behind

Shared by julia... wife to Andy who still makes me laugh every day and mom to 4 kids (and a 5th waiting somewhere in China) who are either making me laugh or making me crazy-o. My goal is to have more laughter than not each day and even if it makes it by .001% then I'm calling it a good day. I homeschool my kids even though I swore I never would. Our family is looking less and less like the "norm" and I'm ok with that. I kind of like it.

Hello. For those of you who don't know me, let me introduce myself. I'm Julia. I like to write it as "julia" b/c capitalizing on the keyboard makes me crazy. And b/c I tend to mis-type my name 90% of the time (usually it ends up as "juila) and the capitalizing always pushes me to 100% failure. And that's annoying...to misspell your own name. But I digress. I do that a lot. I think it's the fact that for the last 12 and 1/2 years I've been a stay at home mom and I tend to always get side-tracked in my actions and thoughts. It translates into not so great paragraph structure.

I'm writing here for the first time b/c I actually have something to write about. Again. Adoption! That's right. We're starting our 2nd adoption for our 5th child. Does five sound like a lot? Because it does to my husband and for some reason does not to me. I think it may be b/c I have a lot of homeschool friends and they tend to have larger than average families. So 5 doesn't seem that crazy. Andy, however, lives among the "real world" and out there people tend to think 4 kids is a crazy big family. So he is always hearing, "Oh. 4 kids. That's a lot." And I rarely hear that and even less rarely (I know, so not good grammar) think that. I find the whole thing fascinating...that "big family" is such a relative term.

Anyone who knows me for say, 5 minutes, probably knows that I was ready to go "back to China again to adopt" before we even got on the plane to get Caleb. I just knew that once I came face to face w/a real live orphan, once I touched the hand of child who had never known what a mother's hand felt like, once I walked through an orphanage, once I saw how many kids we would walk away from and leave behind, I could not NOT go back. I could not look at my life and say, "Nope. No more room. We're full. We're busy. We're done." I just could not say that. And trust me, all signs point to us being done. Our 4 bedrooms are full. Our van is almost full. Our calendar is generally full. Our kitchen table perfectly sits 6 and looks full. Our bank account, however, is definitely not full. So we have many, many reasons to be done.

But one of the many reasons why I can not say no is heard in this video. Andy took this on the day we met Caleb in his orphanage last summer. We were walking down the hallway and we heard these lovely voices singing in the background. We peeked into the door and what we saw you won't be able to see b/c we weren't allowed to take any video of the children there. But the image is etched in my mind forever and I'm pretty sure the sound will be etched in your mind as you listen. I can almost guarantee it.




What you don't see is a "classroom" of children standing on a small stage in a room that mimics a school gymnasium. The kids were elementary aged and were standing all tall and proud and were singing. For no one. For absolutely no one. The gym was empty. It should have been full of chairs w/doting parents looking on. But there weren't any parents. In fact, there were no chairs. Because no one was coming to hear them sing. And no one would ever hear their beautiful song. Their voices were echoing through hallways. Hallways that were always full of children and never full of parents. And I whispered to Andy, "No one is coming." And I cried. And that, my friend, is one of the many reasons why we're going back to China.

How can we not?